Hand delivery
Recent food safety scares, such as Premier Foods' recall of Loyd Grossman Korma curry sauce jars after suspected botulism contamination, have made some firms review their hygiene operations. While the source of contamination has not been identified in the Premier incident, other firms are looking at using robots to reduce the potential risk of contamination through human contact with food.
"A big driver in the food industry is 'untouched by human hands'," says Alan Spreckley, channel partner manager at robot supplier ABB Robotics. "The more times people handle a product, the bigger the chance for contamination."
Until recently, placing food into its primary packaging was a labour-intensive task mainly carried out by human workers. This was due to technological problems with robots gripping items of food, says Mike Wilson, chairman of the British Automation and Robotics Association (BARA). "It can be difficult because you're dealing with product that does not have to be solid. It could be floppy or wet, meaning there are a number of challenges associated with the techniques robots use to pick food up," he says.
However, solutions to the problem of gripping food to be placed in primary packaging have begun to be developed. For example, ABB helped to create a vision system that directs a robotic arm to select and stack products for packaging from a production line. It could even cope with products that overlapped. This was a challenge that had never been previously solved, says Spreckley. ABB installed the system at bakery Honeytop Specialty Foods to improve production and hygiene on its pancake line. ABB has also developed gripping systems that use vacuum to pick up and stack brittle items such as pappadams without breaking them.
If robotics firms continue to develop more solutions to this issue, it will help to increase the uptake of packaging automation, Spreckley says.
Automation could also potentially help extend the shelf-life of products by reducing human contamination, according to Wilson.
While this might be technically feasible, shelf-life is influenced more by deterioration in the quality of food rather than contamination and in this respect robots would offer little benefit over humans, argues Kaarin Goodburn, secretary general of the Chilled Food Association and microbiology expert. Stringent cleaning procedures would also have to be enforced, to prevent bacterial build-up on robots, she adds.
But food manufacturers need to start thinking about production in similar ways to the pharmaceutical industry, says David Maddern, sales director for packaging automation firm Schubert UK. Increasing automation and decreasing the amount of contact humans have during production will lead to significantly better all-round product quality, he adds.
No matter how stringent a food firm's hygiene standards are, each time a human handles an unpacked food product, the risk of a food safety incident increases, says Keith Thornhill, business development manager at Siemens Industry Automation and Drive Technologies, another automation systems provider.
"It's becoming very apparent that the use of robotics in handling food is much safer than trusting the task to humans," says Thornhill.
A robot's ability to withstand washing with caustic solutions and at high temperatures means it can always be cleaned more thoroughly than a pair of hands, adds Spreckley.
Increased throughput
Replacing humans with robots not only decreases the risk of contamination, it can also lead to increased throughput.
Changes in UK demographics, such as an increase in single-person households, and trends towards portion control and eating on-the-go, have led to an increase in demand for food in smaller packages over the last few years, says Roy Fraser, product manager for robotics at Bosch Packaging Technology. To optimise productivity in factories while packaging the same volume of food into smaller packages, manufacturers have discovered a need for the greater throughput speeds and flexibility that robots provide.
The ability of newer versions of robots to quickly sort and pack different varieties of products into multi-packs increases overall line speed, Fraser says. "For example we helped a firm in Scotland that produces food in single-serve packages. It had about 13 different products on a line that needed to be combined into 40 different final multi-packs. This is the kind of flexibility we're starting to see more demand for."
Anywhere there is a lot of low-skilled manual labour such as in primary packaging is an area that is likely to be slowing down the overall throughput of the production line, says Spreckley. If a manufacturer increases the line speed, it can sell more product, which alone often pays for the investment in robots, he adds.
"I always ask people: 'What is the potential line speed?' and 'Where are the bottlenecks?' And the bottlenecks inevitably come where there is a high level of human intervention."
Manual handling is also the most common cause of wastage as products get damaged, says Spreckley. The introduction of automation could improve yields and reduce wastage, providing an important saving for firms on tight margins. "A product is at its most valuable to a manufacturer when they've incurred all their costs in making it," says Spreckley. "It's a crying shame when it's wasted before it's even left the factory." Yet acceptance and uptake in the food sector is still low. In fact, the UK is miles behind other countries such as Germany, claims Wilson.
BARA's latest figures show that German firms in the food, drink and tobacco sectors had 5,708 operational robots in 2010 compared with 779 in the UK. Last year saw 1,336 robots sold in total in the UK just 97 to food and drink firms. "The use of robotics and automation is increasing but not as fast as we'd like," says Wilson. "People have been predicting that food and drink in particular would be a major sector for growth for a number of years now, but that has not been the case."
Because the cost of labour in food and drink is lower than in many other manufacturing sectors, firms struggle to justify the investment when they compare the costs of automation, says Spreckley. Continental manufacturers take a broader view. They include considerations such as increased throughput and fewer damaged products. "Some clients in Europe ended up having to increase their workforce because they could now produce and sell more product."
The long time it takes to get a return on capital investment in the UK's food and drink sector, coupled with the short-term nature of many retail contracts means manufacturers also lack the confidence to invest, says Thornhill. "You need a fair amount of confidence in the strength of your brand," he says. "But in the food industry contracts can be short and you can never be sure if they'll be renewed."
What of the future?
Robot sales to food and drink firms will not increase until their price decreases, says Wilson. However robotic firms need greater volume of sales if they are to take advantage of economies of scale. "It's a vicious circle," he admits.
Robotics firms should provide more details of potential cost savings, says Spreckley. They should offer options, such as free assessments and return on investment calculators to help justify cost, he adds. "In the next three-to-five years, I hope we'll see the increase in automation that's long been predicted."
Although better price justification will help to fuel increased uptake, it will probably be at least five years before all the custom solutions become sufficiently available to be considered standard, says Wilson. It is at this point that the price of a standard robot specific to food sector will start to drop. "Then we may start to see the food industry laying down new lines that are much more automated," he adds.
Until then, manufacturers that want to maintain good food hygiene had best make sure their hand sanitisers are topped up.
